The Journal News

Last Wednesday Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal signed into law a bill that imposes a $10,000 fine and up to six months in jail for anyone who publishes “any information contained in an application for a concealed handgun permit or any information regarding the identity of any person who applied for or received a concealed handgun permit.”

The bill’s sponsor, state Rep. Jeff Thompson, cited The (Westchester County, N.Y.) Journal News’ publication of a map identifying holders of gun permits late last year as impetus for the measure, and said the law represented “a great day in Louisiana and across this nation for those of us who refuse to give an inch when it comes to defending our right to protect our families and we will stand strong in the defense of the Second Amendment.”

But this particular law has a serious First Amendment dimension as well. Read more

Mayor Mike Bell said the map, which is part of a series, threatened outside investment in the city. The series started Sunday.

“I would say it is probably one of the most irresponsible forms of journalism that I have read in the paper since I have been in this city, from the standpoint of the recoil it possibly will have on the economy in terms of being able to recruit people and bring people in,” Mr.

The Des Moines Register published then removed an interactive map Wednesday that looked at how school resource officers are deployed in Iowa after it drew criticism from people who thought the map showed unprotected districts. Or as Fox News host Megyn Kelly put it, “If I’m some psycho, I might wanna play my odds.”

“I was stupid. Also naïve,” Arkansas Business Editor Gwen Moritz writes about her decision to post, then take down, a list of Arkansas concealed carry permit holders’ names and ZIP codes.

After she posted the list “my name, my husband’s name, home address, phone and work phone numbers and pictures of my house — from the same Pulaski County tax records that Arkansas Business regularly mines for news — were posted all over the Internet,” Moritz writes.

Our home phone began ringing constantly, silenced only when we unplugged it in order to go to sleep. (This may be the prompt I needed to finally get rid of that landline.) My work email address filled up with requests, complaints, insults, veiled threats and, yes, quite a few messages of thanks and appreciation.

I spoke with the reporter, who was up against a deadline, for about 10 minutes. The story that appeared the next morning omitted at least 99.9 percent of our conversation. My contribution to public enlightenment consisted of a single remark shorn of context and nuance and stuck in a bottom paragraph that begged to go unread.

We have informed the agencies who received our request to disregard it. We’ve informed the agencies who have responded that their records will be destroyed.

The paper, Ronzio writes, “never would have published personally identifying information of any permit holder in Maine, as a newspaper in New York had done. To have done so would have been irresponsible to our readers and our communities.” Read more

Nicholas Stehle of the gun-advocacy group Arkansas Carry said the names and ZIP codes of gun owners are “more information than I’d be comfortable sharing if I were a single woman with an abusive ex-husband.” Arkansas Gov. Read more

Capital
A New York appellate court has sided with the New York City Police Department in a dispute over whether it should turn over home addresses of handgun owners to The New York Times, which made a Freedom of Information Law request for them in 2010. Dana Rubinstein describes the court’s thinking: Releasing the addresses “might endanger permit-holders, and, since the NYPD had already released the zip codes of permit-holders to the Times, would really serve no further journalistic purpose.”